“I’m great in the sack.”
That’s not a brag — it’s an exploration of positive self-talk therapy combined with a bit of research-backed cognitive behavioral therapy.
In layman’s terms: there’s now an app called GG Sex Life that’ll improve your sexual confidence, and it just involves a bit of swiping on your phone and embracing some self-esteem building.
Developed by entrepreneur Gur Ilany and Dr. Guy Doron (a clinical psychologist and researcher), GG Sex Life and its parent company, GG Apps, were founded with the idea of “helping people find more joy in life.”
Inspiration was easy to come by. “I guess there is no better inspiration than sex, is there?” says Ilany.
The apps work by building confidence and healthier self-talk through quick training sessions. Each app focuses on one disorder or phenomenon to overcome, including relationship anxiety, confidence/self-esteem, OCD, body image, depression and — just now — sexual well-being.
Everything on the GG platform, as Dr. Doron explains, is based on cognitive behavioral therapy models. “CBT is research-driven therapy that’s considered the gold standard for many psychological difficulties and sexual problems, such as male impotence, premature ejaculation, vaginismus and more,” he says. “CBT models suggest that the way we interpret reality — our self-talk — affects how we function in the world. If our self-talk is mainly negative and rigid, we’ll have difficulties in functioning and less satisfaction from life.”
So the idea is not to, say, focus on your performance or how your erection isn’t as strong as it was 20 years ago. That makes things worse, and “people with sexual difficulties often have the belief that they have to perform or they will be abandoned,” Dr. Doron explains. Instead, embrace change and what is working.
How GG Sex Life works: Download the app — it’s free, though there are paid models that give you more access to different features. You’ll be asked a few basic questions (age, sex, mood) and then you’ll rate yourself on a few different sex-related topics on a scale of 1-5 (“Pleasure I provide to my partner”; “My body’s sexual functioning”; etc.)
From there, you complete a few “levels” of mental training per day, which is basically just looking at negative (“sexual activity must be initiated by the man”) and positive (“flexibility in my thinking can improve my sexuality”) statements. Swipe the positives toward you, swipe the negatives away.
That’s it, along with an occasional quiz or explanation.
There’s no “wrong” answer — you’ll always throw away the bad and embrace the positive, even if you don’t believe the answer is true. And you’ll be limited to just a few thematic levels per day (e.g. “Lesson 8: Accepting Variability in Sex”), with the ability to save certain answers to a personal toolbox.
All this quick embracing of positive sexual thoughts will coalesce over time, making you a more confident person.
According to Ilany, a few recent studies (both independent and internal) have shown that using the platform helps people change: users of the app had “reduced doubts, obsessions and increased self-esteem” in just two weeks.
Look, if nothing else, it certainly can’t hurt to try it out. As Illany notes: “We want people to have a quick session, learn something and be inspired, then go back to the real life where they can use what they learned. Hopefully in bed.”
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